Lombardy is going to increase its appeal for foreign direct investments through the exploitation of the positive trend affecting its tourism industry. Labour costs, productivity, skills: when talking about FDIs you are surely used to spot these keywords, together with data about IP, clusters and so on. Tourism is usually not mentioned as a driver for FDIs, but considered a facilitating factor in increasing the interest for real estate in a territory.

Actually there are evidences showing the existence of the long-run and a bi-directional causal relationship between FDIs and tourism, mainly focused on the real estate sector. Lombardy developed in the past an international image based on mainly on industrial clusters, R&D, universities, but in the last years emerged as a leader region also in tourism. Lombardy ranks now number 1 among Italian regions, being the most preferred by international tourists (data elaborated by Destination Management Insighters).

The tourism sector in Lombardy is combining mainstream tourism with specialties, famous destinations and hidden treasures, in a mix between leisure and business. The sector is growing by 11% in 2016, generating more that 37 million visits with 50% of foreign travellers.

Among others, two main events shaped the future of the destination: ExpoMilano 2015 and Floating piers. The first one brought in Lombardy more than 25 million people in six months, the second one is a very peculiar experience. These events had a powerful effect in terms of communication and increase of destination awareness.

Social media are now a protagonist in the promotion strategy for Lombardy, where the use of a specific hashtag (#inLombardia365) is animating the discussion on Twitter proposing a different destination every day.

After the boost of ExpoMilano 2015, tourism in Lombardy is going to make the region more attractive for foreign investments, offering modern infrastructure and a wide variety of choice. Just to focus on sports and nature, Lombardy offers 24 parks, 116 bike roads, 7,150 kilometers of paths.

More details about the performance of tourism in Lombardy can be found here.